Dhiren Gandhi turned out in a few years to be an artist with a Gandhian sensibility. He sketched, drew, and painted moving images of his granduncle meditating, sleeping, and most dramatically, fasting for 21 days in early 1943 while interned at the Aga Khan Palace in Poona on yet another term as a colonial prisoner (Fig. 2). Several of Dhiren’s works were autographed by his famous subject (Fig. 1). Along with his older brother Navin (who also grew up in the ashram, and is credited with some much-circulated photographs of Gandhi, and a life-size portrait of his grandaunt Kasturba), Dhiren went on to establish an art school in Bombay in 1944 called Rupayatan, where children from the Vile Parle neighborhood were taught arts and crafts free of cost.

At the other end of the social and caste spectrum from Dhiren Gandhi stands Chhaganlal Jadav (1903–87), the first Dalit artist who we know of to draw and paint the Mahatma. His remarkable sketches of Gandhi at one of his most disobedient moments—the Salt Satyagraha of 1930—have only recently come to light. As a child born into a weaver family, young Chhagan was deemed in the parlance of the day an antyaj (outcaste). From the recently-published oral history of the artist, we learn that Chhagan attended as a 12-year-old the night school for antyaj children set up by Gandhi in Kochrab in 1915. In his autobiography in a chapter titled “On the Anvil,” the Mahatma writes in some detail (but from his perspective) that the pledge taken against the “sinful” practice of untouchability in his ashram led to the arrival of Dudabhai, his wife Daniben, and infant daughter (Lakshmi) who took up residence despite considerable tension in the new community. No mention is made however of a similar “adoption” of Chhagan, who with Gandhi’s blessings, reportedly went on to study with two of Gujarat’s most famous artists, Kanu Desai and Ravishankar Raval, eventually making a name for himself as an artist from around 1935.